On her last solo album, “Terrestre,” flutist Claire Chase performed pieces by Boulez and Carter, and threw in a new Kaija Saariaho premiere for good measure. With her newest album, “Density,” she presents the most varied “American” program yet from any soloist in the International Contemporary Ensemble orbit. (Chase is the virtuoso group’s executive director.)

Steve Reich’s Vermont Counterpoint is first up: Chase multitracks its 11 parts, but rather than feeling studio-cramped, it’s expressive. Her downshift into the slow section is majestic. A rare recording of Philip Glass’s Piece In the Shape of a Square, written in 1967, doubles up on the album’s minimalist bona fides—though this connection between two pieces is hardly the most interesting one on the album.

Three other pieces suggest two additional, complementary pairings. Electronic-acoustic dialogue is foregrounded on Alvin Lucier’sAlmost New York: the flutist has to look for ways to blend in with the pure-wave oscillators, and thus manipulate the “density” of her instrument to get the cleanest sound possible. By contrast, Mario Diaz de Léon’s Luciform pits flute-tones in stark relief against a barrage of alien electronic effects. Here, Chase deals with chords of doom-metal texture, and, at the end, sheets of tintinnabulation that sound as if grabbed from Stockhausen’s Cosmic Pulses. Diaz de Leon’s composition is the most varied-sounding one on the album—a perfect foil for Lucier’s drone-work.

But Luciform also has a connection to another piece, Marcos Balter’s Pessoa (for six bass flutes). Both composed in 2013, their distinct approaches make a powerful argument for the current health of the New York scene. Less hyperactive than Luciform, Balter’s Pessoa nevertheless is full of activity: a nimbus of five multi-tracked parts often swarms around the solo bass-flute lead, casting delicate shadows of flutter-tongue action. At other points that chorus coalesces into keening chords.

All that’s left is for Chase to pivot back to a key text of the solo flute literature: Edgard Varèse’s Density 21.5. Its register leaps aren’t just “navigated”—they’re all but dared to trouble the flautist. They don’t, much. As on the other pieces, sometimes her instrument sounds as if disembodied, while at other moments the human breath rattling around in the density of the instrument is a presence all its own.

Does the flute have a more interesting champion right now than Claire Chase? At 35, this New York-based virtuoso has carved out a key role for herself in contemporary music, commissioning and performing a range of new works for flute that have brought much-needed fire to the repertoire.

The indefatigable Chase — she’s also a founder of the International Contemporary Ensemble and a 2012 MacArthur Fellow — has just released her third CD, titled “Density.” On Saturday night at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, she put on a riveting performance of the music from that disc: a 75-minute tour de force that showed Chase to be among the most electrifying flutists on the planet — and showed the flute as an instrument whose possibilities have only begun to be explored.

Chase tossed out the usual concert conventions, performing alone — accompanied only by electronics or her own pre-recorded flute tracks — and dressed near-invisibly on an almost dark stage, playing the entire program as a highly amplified and uninterrupted whole. The effect was spellbinding. As each work moved seamlessly into the next, Chase explored different forms of density — of textures, of thought, of sheer sonic weight — gradually narrowing the focus from the playful 11-flute orchestra of Steve Reich’s “Vermont Counterpoint” to the climactic, elemental intensity of Edgard Varese’s 1936 masterwork for solo flute, “Density 21.5.”

And through all the works — which included Marcos Balter’s dark and deeply poetic “Pessoa” for six bass flutes; Alvin Lucier’s maddening but strangely beguiling “Almost New York” for flutes and sustained sine tones (patience required); Mario Diaz de Leon’s idea-dense “Luciform” (a vibrant sort-of-sonata for flute and electronics, from 2013); and Philip Glass’s tail-chasing “Piece in the Shape of a Square” for two flutes — Chase played with the kind of vitality and directness and effortless virtuosity that you always hope to hear in the concert hall but too rarely do. All in all, an extraordinary evening from one of the brightest lights on the contemporary music scene, and a high point of the Atlas’s ongoing New Music series.

]]>http://clairechase.net/washington-post-claire-chase-wows-atlas-with-an-evening-of-flute/feed/0Claire Chase is featured on The Story from American Public Mediahttp://clairechase.net/claire-chase-and-her-flute/
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On The Story on American Public Media, Dick Gordon speaks with musician and MacArthur fellow Claire Chase about her passion to push the flute beyond traditional notes. She fell in love with an experimental piece when she was young and has not looked back. She has put her energy into the International Contemporary Ensemble, which aims to poke holes in the wall separating classical and experimental music.

Claire Chase learned she was one of the recipients of this year’s MacArthur Awards last week during a sound check for a solo performance that the 34-year-old flutist gave in Guangzhou, China.

“I was completely stunned,” Chase, co-founder and director of the Chicago and New York-based International Contemporary Ensemble, confessed via email.

“I am tremendously honored and humbled by this award, and I am deeply proud of the community of ICE artists whose tireless work over the past decade has brought new music from the sidelines to the forefront.

“What excites me most about this recognition is the possibility of its resonance for other young artists, arts activists and nonprofit arts groups who are committed to forging new paths and changing the field.”

The MacArthur Award further cites Chase’s successful efforts as an “arts entrepreneur” to forge “a new model for the commissioning, recording and live performance of classical music, and opening new avenues of artistic expression for the 21st century musician.”

Chase admits she can’t quite believe the ensemble has traveled this far, this fast.

She co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble on a budget of about $500 in Chicago 10 years ago along with a cadre of 15 fellow instrumentalists from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. Their ambition was to create a dynamic, free-form ensemble that would advance new music and cultivate an extensive and eclectic repertory.

Chase envisioned the group eventually becoming as important and relevant to the cultural life of great cities as museums, symphony orchestras and opera companies — a “crazy idea,” she admits today. It isn’t anywhere near that goal, but give it time.

Little by little, the ensemble has taken on new members — the roster now stands at 30 musicians — and is busy establishing satellite locations beyond Chicago and New York, where Chase currently resides. Offshoots on the West Coast and in Berlin, Brazil and Belize are in the works, she says.

Along with exploring neglected corners of the existing repertory, Chase and friends also actively commission new works from young and emerging composers. The ensemble has presented well more than 300 world premieres to date, presenting its wide-ranging programs in settings ranging from traditional concert halls to art galleries, warehouses, clubs and public spaces.

An accomplished flutist who maintains an active solo career in addition to administering and performing as a member of the ensemble, Chase has herself premiered more than 100 new works for flute.

But whether this busy young artist is going it alone or teaming up with her colleagues onstage, she is committed to stimulating audience members to engage with the sounds of today — and with much the same passion that drives her and her peers.

New York is full of talented musicians, as well as artistic entrepreneurs who busily create their own opportunities to flourish. The flutist Claire Chase fits into each of those categories and then some. Both as a performer and as the executive director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, which she helped found in 2001, she has had a hand in some of the most memorable musical events of the last several years.

Somehow Ms. Chase has also found time to further her own career as a soloist, and in 2008 she won the annual Concert Artists Guild competition. On Thursday night that organization presented her in recital before a boisterous capacity audience in Weill Recital Hall.

A demonstration of extravagant technique, broad stylistic range and penetrating musicality was certainly in order, and Ms. Chase delivered. But she also used the opportunity to showcase the talents of her colleagues, enlisting eight members of her ensemble to share in the occasion. (That number included Whit Bernard, the group’s director of development, who provided intelligent, unusually engaging program notes.)

The concert opened with Bach’s Sonata for Flute and Keyboard in E (BWV 1035), with the guitarist Daniel Lippel performing his own deft arrangement of the keyboard part. Ms. Chase’s precise, polished playing had a buoyant spontaneity; Mr. Lippel was an attentive, sensitive partner.

In the modern works that followed, Ms. Chase and her collaborators showed a consistent knack for illuminating communicative strands within knotty conceptions. She and Jacob Greenberg, a confident and insightful pianist, made a kittenish frolic of Franco Donatoni’s prickly “Fili,” and balanced the bright, hard clashes in Pierre Boulez’s Sonatine for Flute and Piano with melancholy lyricism and careful attention to color.

Bach returned in the form of the familiar organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565), improbably reworked for solo flute by Salvatore Sciarrino. Ms. Chase handled racing lines and daunting register leaps with muscular grace, her labor rewarded with a shouting, stomping ovation. As an equally unlikely encore, Ms. Chase played her own arrangement of Paganini’s Caprice No. 24, expertly deploying unconventional techniques to evoke a violinist’s bowed chords and plucks.

Calling your new-music festival Darmstadt Essential Repertoire is a conscious provocation on multiple levels, as the New York composers Zach Layton and Nick Hallett surely realized when they chose the name. It alludes to the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, a venerable and formidable German laboratory for avant-garde innovation, known for dogmatic (and sometimes rancorous) adherence to modernist severity.

By contrast, Darmstadt Classics of the Avant-Garde, the concert series Mr. Layton and Mr. Hallett present regularly in New York nightclubs and other unorthodox spaces, embraces rigor only in the sense of polished performances. Otherwise the mode is casual, the aesthetic open-minded and inclusive. Darmstadt Essential Repertoire, the three-year-old festival that opened at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn on Wednesday night, follows suit.

“Essential” is a matter of perspective and taste but also implies an optimistic volition: here, the organizers assert, are works worth preserving, playing and celebrating. Even “repertoire” has multiple shades: in the simple sense of material to be performed and in deeper dimensions of worth and permanence.

Several events in this year’s festival venture to troublesome frontiers. Stockhausen, the subject of Thursday’s concert and a central figure in the original Darmstadt courses, was a marginalized enigma when he died in 2007, with works once considered seminal lapsed into disuse. John Cage and Christian Wolff, represented in Friday’s event, elude canonicity. Saturday’s concert addresses two Minimalist milestones: one obscure (“An Hour for Piano” by Tom Johnson), the other impractical (Philip Glass’s opera “Einstein on the Beach,” parts of which will be played in arrangements by the violinist Mary Rowell).

But by now few would dispute that Berio’s “Sequenzas,” a series of intense, virtuosic pieces for solo performers, have achieved repertory status. On Wednesday, the first 10 of these works (there are 14 in all), played by a starry roster of young new-music luminaries, attracted a capacity crowd on a blustery night to a cozy space well off the beaten path.

These unsparingly difficult works have thrived because they appeal as much to a listener’s ear as to a musician’s sense of adventure. Some, like the First, for flute, suggest apotheosis; here, as Claire Chase fluttered, popped, swooped and sang, you felt that the instrument’s full potential had been achieved.

The Fifth, for trombone, limns the instrument’s capacity for robust humor with melancholy undercurrents; Chris McIntyre gave full measure to both in a poignant interpretation. “Sequenza IXa,” for clarinet, is a glorious outpouring that seemingly alludes to folk song, aria and jazz; Joshua Rubin, incapable of playing an inexpressive note, provided a commanding account.

Other “Sequenzas” cast against type. The Second, beautifully played by the harpist Shelley Burgon, brushes aside frippery and frills in favor of evocative mystery. Likewise, the Sixth turns the normally modest viola into a fiery protagonist; John Pickford Richards played with precision and stamina. The remaining “Sequenzas” had equally admirable advocates in the soprano Daisy Press, the pianist Stephen Gosling, the oboist James Austin Smith, the violinist Joshua Modney and the trumpeter Gareth Flowers.

Claire Chase offered to send a helicopter to pick me up each morning during the seven days I followed her to produce this story.

She was only kidding. As we waited on a variety of subway platforms everywhere between Sunset Park, Brooklyn and Harlem in northern Manhattan, most of our conversations that week involved jetpacks: more cost effective than helicopters and engineered for independent travel. It’s much more the kind of proposal I’d have expected from Claire. After all, she’s not just a musician — she essentially runs a small business. And, as I learned, she’s also mastered the science of propulsion.

We’d met casually a few years ago, after a concert by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), which Claire founded in 2001 and leads as its Executive Director. The group has consistently impressed me. It performs with intensity and power; has quickly evolved from a start-up into an established leader of the new music scene; and has cultivated a young and vibrant community of supporters. I wanted to know how she’d managed to accomplish all of this from a practical perspective. When she showed me her Google calendar — a rainbow of dense blocks — I wondered if it represented a life of nightmarish chaos.

Hardly. As Claire blazed and I trailed, the schedule was tight, but not impossible. The days were often long — a few topped 14 hours — but the time passed quickly. Administrative tasks were accomplished by the dozens with fierce efficiency and balanced by hours at play. Our encounters with others were generous, full of gifts and surprises. They included a conversation with 88 year-old composer Chou Wen-chung, who helped to establish US-Chinese cultural relations decades ago; and a planning session with Habib Azar, who will produce a new solo multimedia show for Claire next year called GASP. (His day job is directing CBS’s The Young and The Restless.) Unwinding after hours fed other creative appetites, at the Lambda Literary Awards, where an acceptance speech by Edward Albee drew Claire’s rare ire — and a reception for the artist Olek, queen of yarn bombing.

You can read about my adventures with Claire below (or listen to it by clicking the link above), and you can find an even more complete account of our activities archived at twitter.com/iveheardworse, hashtag #chaseclaire.

In the end, I had enough material for seven stories. But the takeaway was simple: with a smile and a kind word, Claire puts her shoulder to the wheel every day, day in and day out, using every scrap of every moment to inch forward toward her goals. This, her life seems to say, is how we earn our wings. This is how we fly.

Carnegie Hall sees its share of sleepy, under-attended recitals. Claire Chase’s debut last year was not one of them. High energy from start to finish, the packed house leapt out of its seats for three standing ovations, the kind of response Chase seems to be getting wherever she goes.

At a time when orchestras are folding and cutting back their schedules, the future of classical music can look bleak. That’s especially true for the freelance musician. But Chase, the flutist and Executive Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), is one leader in a growing movement that’s abuzz with fresh activity — new music.

I recently spent a week just trying to keep up with Chase. The bulk of her days are generally spent far from New York’s elite cultural institutions, in the working class neighborhood of Sunset Park. If you’ve ever been stuck in traffic on the southbound side of the elevated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, you may have seen her and her fellow musicians through the picture window of a fourth story loft known to its inhabitants as the ICEhaus.

“People are perplexed,” Chase says, “They look in that window at eye level and they’re like what are they doing? They see the gongs and all of the electronic gear. We see a lot of nose pickers, too.”

It’s 8 a.m., the time Chase usually arrives at the studio to practice. It’s often the only time she has to herself. Afterward, she heads upstairs to the office to answer phone calls and wade through some of her 30,081 unread email messages.

Chase is incredibly busy at a time when most New York freelance musicians can seem like a dying breed.

“The old model of playing in a fixed freelance orchestra and doing advertising jingles and soundtracks and gigging around town and making a good living — that’s really dried up,” says Dan Wakin, a reporter for the Culture department at The New York Times.

Most of those musicians are in their 50s and 60s. Chase is 33 and doesn’t share their nostalgia for the way things used to be.

“Are we the generation who waits for the phone to ring? No. Do we wait for someone to say here’s your amazing opportunity to do this project you’ve been dreaming of that’s totally risky, that no one else would produce? No. We do it for ourselves and we do it for one another,” she says.

Producing new music — with its strange and wondrous sounds — has historically been left to do-it-yourselfers. Chase finds herself doing a little bit of everything every day, from planning board meetings to finding hotel rooms for musicians on the road — even cleaning up after her staff of three.

“If I can be the janitor and save us some money, I’ll be the janitor for as long as I need to be,” she says.

Chase was on a Greyhound bus to Chicago fresh out of Oberlin when she made the decision to start her own ensemble. It was ten years ago, at a moment when a crop of new music groups came into being: eighth blackbird, Argento, Alarm Will Sound.

Cellist Fred Sherry, known for his work in new music, says what’s happening today is as seismic as the explosion of composers in Vienna a century ago:

“I sometimes think of it like the San Andreas fault. It moves approximately an inch or two inches a year — it averages out to that. In 1913, it jumped 20 yards and now it may be jumping again and in a very important way.”

Now in his 60s, Sherry was one of those do-it-yourselfers three decades ago. But he didn’t consider it part of the job description and there wasn’t much infrastructure for support.

“In those early days, we picked on anybody that had a hundred or a thousand dollars,” Sherry recalls, adding, “That was a lot of money in 1973.”

Today the annual budget for ICE is around $800,000, which supports 50 concerts a year. Much of the ensemble’s music comes from commissions — brand new pieces custom-made for various combinations of the group’s 33 musicians.

By mid-afternoon on Friday, Chase is rehearsing with Steve Lehman, one of five composers she’s met with in the course of the week. Afterwards, Chase crisscrosses the city by subway, Blackberry in hand, for meetings: with a board member, TV producer, choreographer, flute technician, and sound editor, not to mention a trip up to Yonkers for a recording session.

When I showed Fred Sherry her calendar, he was skeptical of her ability to juggle so many roles and live the life of an artist.

“She’s scheduling every moment of the day,” he says, “Where was the time that she did the dreaming?”

Chase sees it differently — a necessity in a new age where artists have to be entrepreneurs.

“For me, it was a realization early on that the only way to do what I wanted to do artistically was if I drove that bus myself,” she says. “I realized in doing it that I enjoyed it and there were aspects of the business side that were really challenging in an invigorating way. To be totally honest, there’s a part of it that is an absolute drag, but that’s like any job.”

It’s now 7 p.m. at the end of a long week and Chase is onstage at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge, a downtown venue near New York University. When she’s in front of the standing-room-only crowd, it doesn’t look like just any job. It looks like a dream.

There’s a 1976 recording of James Galway playing Paganini’s “Moto Perpetuo” on his golden flute, in which you never once hear him draw breath.

At the time, it was lauded as an almost superhuman feat; a virtuosic example of circular breathing, a technique that allows wind players to simultaneously inhale air through the nose while breathing it out through the mouth. (Galway later confessed the recording had been spliced together.) In 1997, saxophonist Kenny G used circular breathing to play a continuous, unbroken note for a total of 45 minutes and 47 seconds, earning him a mention in the Guinness Book of Records.

Last week’s concert by flutist Claire Chase at (Le) Poisson Rouge, celebrating the release of her new CD “Terrestre,” offered no shortage of athletic challenges and technical sorcery of its own. But what struck me the most about the recent compositions for flute was the return of the breath. By turns expressive, mysterious, and dramatic, it was always unapologetically human. As Chase later told me over the phone, “Breath is the one thing we can’t live without. As flute players, it’s something we should honor.”

Of all the wind instruments, the flute is the least efficient in transforming breath into musical sound, because so much of the air is lost when the player blows across the opening in the mouthpiece. (At the other spectrum is the oboe with its tightly pressed double reed, which wastes so little air that oboists have to empty out their lungs at the end of a phrase before quickly tanking up again.) Normally, classical flutists are taught to make the breath as self-effacing as possible – to banish that persistent ffff-sound that is usually the mark of a beginner.

But in Chase’s performance of “Glacier” (2010), a solo for bass flute by Dai Fujikura, her breath floated audibly above much of the music, giving it a ghostly quality. With subtle changes in the angle of the mouthpiece, she was able to invoke the sound of more ancient types of flutes made out of wood, bamboo and stone.

Her inhalations, too, became part of the music. Contemporary composers like Fujikura, says Chase, “have started to think of breath as an ornament and as an expressive device in its own right, whether it’s a subtle, moody breath or the dramatic gesture of an inhalation. Some breaths are even notated in the music: it increases the drama.”

Breath also became a character in Kaija Saariaho’s “Terrestre” (2003), a spirited, fanciful work for flute, strings, harp and percussion in which Chase was joined by her colleagues from the International Contemporary Ensemble. “Terrestre” is inspired by an Aboriginal tale of a bird teaching an entire village to dance. In it, the composer calls on the flutist to sing, too, sometimes while simultaneously playing another note, other times alternating, so that a conversation ensues between voice and instrument.

It’s a magical effect, but startling, too, because we have come to think of classical performers as transparent conduits for pure music. Bringing their breath and voice back into the performance is a way of asserting their physicality and individual sound. To do it well and remain within the confines of art takes the kind of combination of grace and guts that make Chase one of the more formidable forces on the classical scene – but the result is a full-throated affirmation of chamber music as human drama.

Sure, Claire Chase’s Terrestre may not boast the ear-worminess of “Zou Bisou Bisou,” the latter of which was sung on last month’s season opener of Mad Men (and subsequently by everyone everywhere the following Monday morning). But, much like the French pop ditty, there’s something immediately captivating, compelling and compulsive about this feisty flautist’s newest solo album.

Chase, one of the indefatigable forces behind the International Contemporary Ensemble, has never been one to hide her voracious appetite for new music, as seen on her 2009 debut solo album Aliento. But here, she also shows off her magnetic ringleader persona, bringing together a number of performers to accompany her on an odyssey through Saariaho, Carter, Boulez, Fujikura and Franco Donatoni.

Worth the price of admission alone is the world-premiere recording of Kaija Saariaho’s Terrestre, an opening track that percolates with a gamine energy and beguiling bird calls (this is a revamped version of the second movement to Saariaho’s flute concerto, set to poetry by Saint-John Perse that evokes birds in flight). Rather than adopt a Messiaen complex, Saariaho’s piece delves into the soaring psychological aspects of being able to take flight at will, and Chase makes each of those requisite soaring dives along with members of ICE.

Throughout the album, Chase displays a dreamy flute technique, ringing crystalline and clarion when she wants to, but also exploring the textural possibilities of the instrument in pieces like Donatoni’s Fili and Boulez’s Flute Sonatina (both played with pianist Jacob Greenberg). She balances disturbingly well with partners like clarinetist Joshua Rubin on Elliott Carter’s 1985 duet Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux. We hear her completely solo on another world-premiere track, Dai Fujikura’s Glacier for bass flute, the effect of which creates a low and languid pace across a frozen five minutes.

As a bonus track, we’re treated to a roundabout thematic conclusion that ties the whole album together in a neat bow: Chase’s reading of poet Laura Mullen’s Was O (a soundalike for the French term for bird, “oiseau”). In speaking, Chase captures the lyrical rhythms of the preceding pieces—“Was O” is said in the same cadence as the first two notes for the preceding Fujikura work—and thematic currents. After listening to this unorthodox encore, you may be tempted, perspective renewed, to listen to the preceding five tracks again.